Nocturnal Transgressions in The House of Sleep : Anna Kavan's Maternal Registers

Despite the critical attention feminist theorists have paid both to redefining the boundaries of modernism and to recuperating "lost" twentieth-century women writers, there remains a conspicuous neglect of British experimentalists, among them, Anna Kavan (19021968).2 Although Kavan published ten of her eighteen novels and short-story collections between 1929 and 1947, the critical evaluation so far evades serious consideration of her placement in the history of modernist fiction by women; instead, it has focused on Kavan herself as a literary curiosity, driven by a raving solipsism.3